Wall Street Joins Circle's Arc Blockchain Infrastructure

Circle's Arc has launched as an 'Economic OS' for traditional and on-chain markets, featuring major financial institutions like BlackRock and Mastercard as validators.

The network uses USDC for gas fees and targets institutional settlement, with a unique Layer 1 model where validation is permissioned at launch.

Over 100 applications and ecosystem participants were integrated by the time of the public debut, including Uniswap, Aave, Binance, Coinbase, and Kraken.

Circle's role has shifted from just being a stablecoin issuer to controlling blockchain infrastructure where USDC can be used for payments, trading, lending, and settlement of tokenized assets.